Halleck's New English Literature eBook

Later Years.—­By the time he had been for
ten years in London, his abilities were sufficiently
well known to the leading booksellers for them to
hire him to compile a Dictionary of the English
Language for L1575. He was seven years at
this work, finishing it in 1755. Between 1750
and 1760 he wrote the matter for two periodicals, The
Rambler (1750-1752) and The Idler (1758-1760),
which contain papers on manners and morals. He
intended to model these papers on the lines of The
Tatler and The Spectator, but his essays
are for the most part ponderously dull and uninteresting.

In 1762, for the first time, he was really an independent
man, for then George III. gave him a life pension
of L300 a year. Even as late as 1759, in order
to pay his mother’s funeral expenses, Johnson
had been obliged to dash off the romance of Rasselas
in a week; but from the time he received his pension,
he had leisure “to cross his legs and have his
talk out” in some of the most distinguished gatherings
of the eighteenth century. During the rest of
his life he produced little besides Lives of the
English Poets, which is his most important contribution
to literature. In 1784 he died, and was buried
in Westminster Abbey among the poets whose lives he
had written.

A Man of Character.—­Any one who will read
Macaulay’s Life of Johnson[2] may become
acquainted with some of Johnson’s most striking
peculiarities; but these do not constitute his claims
to greatness. He had qualities that made him
great in spite of his peculiarities. He knocked
down a publisher who insulted him, and he would never
take insolence from a superior; but there is no case
on record of his having been unkind to an inferior.
Goldsmith said: “Johnson has nothing of
a bear but the skin.” When some one manifested
surprise that Johnson should have assisted a worthless
character, Goldsmith promptly replied: “He
has now become miserable, and that insures the protection
of Johnson.”

Johnson, coming home late at night, would frequently
slip a coin into the hand of a sleeping street Arab,
who, on awakening, was rejoiced to find provision
thus made for his breakfast. He spent the greater
part of his pension on the helpless, several of whom
he received into his own house.

There have been many broader and more scholarly Englishmen,
but there never walked the streets of London a man
who battled more courageously for what he thought
was right. The more we know of him, the more
certain are we to agree with this closing sentence
from Macaulay’s Life of Johnson:
“And it is but just to say that our intimate
acquaintance with what he would himself have called
the anfractuosities of his intellect and of his temper
serves only to strengthen our conviction that he was
both a great and a good man.”